TheMaterialismofBiologicalEncounters 109
colonialism. Cleaning up the island from its medical scourge seemed to
offerproofforsuchclaimsandreassuredU.S.-Americansthattheirrole
in the hemisphere was that of the good medical Samaritan whose work
was beneficial to himself and the rest of hemisphere.^62 It also offered a
body of evidence—in a literal as well as metaphorical sense—for
President Roosevelt's claim that U.S.-American expansionism brought
about the ultimate "triumph of civilization over forces which stand for
theblackchaosofsavageryandbarbarism"(qtd.inW.Anderson69;cf.
Fanon,Studies122). Medical progress here got an American imprint
while the idea of U.S.-American Manifest Destiny could be amplified
withanewfoundsenseofmanifestmedicaldestiny.
In addition to such ideological windfall, there would soon be a
materialgeopoliticalbonustobegarnered.Controloverthehemispheric
infection of yellow fever made it possible for U.S.-Americans to
succeed where Ferdinand de Lesseps, the famed architect of the Suez
Canal,hadfailed:^63 buildingthePanamaCanal—andthusstrengthening
theirinformalempireovertheInter-Americanhemisphere.
Since that time, the self-amplifying threat of unwilled connectivities
withthe"hotzone"haslostlittleofitscompellingauthorityevenasthe
medical means of combatting migratory infectious diseases have
improved very much. Today, it is no longer Cuba, but the island of
Haiti, the poorest country in the Americas that has attained the dubious
distinctionofbeingthepremierbiomedicalthreatscapein theAmerican
hemisphere,alocationthatharborsallmannerofinfectiousdiseasesand
therefore the nodal point of an Inter-American geography of blame. In
the context of the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, when the HI-virus jumped
thebarrierfrombeingabiological-medicaltoapublic-mediareality,the
blamegamein theU.S.firsttookon"deviant"peopleathomebutsoon
begantogointernational.SenatorJesseHelms(R-NorthCarolina),who
had before vigorously attacked gay people, now introduced legislation
(^62) Sinclair Lewis, inArrowsmith(1925), would later take up and satirize this
self-complacent position, speaking of medical progress as a token of "... how
benevolent the United States had been to its Little Brothers—Mexico, Cuba,
Haiti,Nicaragua..."(385).
(^63) The Lesseps project had collapsed from lack of finances and bouts of yellow
feveraswellasmalariaamongthecanalworkers(A.Crosby244).